Twin Peaks

Read your recap(s) of The Return - currently working a night shift, so pretty sure I missed something. All I know is I will have to read it again and then watch the entire thing again. I have only two things to say at this moment, though - first, great work and analysis, right or wrong. I'm impressed with how much you notice and remember as you progress through the show. And thank you so much for posting it here, it'll make rewatching the series more enjoyable, of that I'm quite certain.

Second:

so pretty sure I missed something.- Ringo

{{Ha more likely I did! There's a lot of it, especially when you take in the official companion books written by Frost like Secret History of Twin Peaks and The Final Dossier ect (which is where a lot of the information in the time line bit I did comes from).


'first, great work and analysis, right or wrong.'

Thanks Ringo, I appreciate you taking the time out to read it. As to right or wrong, that's the great thing about Peaks I'm not sure it really matters in the end, not so much as how it made it you feel and react and consider new concepts. In the end I think the experience is far more the point of it than understanding it- bit like life (but like life its irresistibly fun to try to make sense of it all).

'I'm impressed with how much you notice and remember'

Ah well, good education in crabbit primary school there to thank for that - one of the first rules you learn at school in Scotshobbitland, this used to be written on the old fashioned blackboard in chalk every morning of school-

"Crabbit's nae yuse tae yi i' yi didnae pay attentshun tae whits mukin' yi crabbit i' the firs' place."

(and in plainer but more boring English)

'Crabbit is of no use to you if you don't pay attention to what's making you crabbit in the first place.'

Wise, but crabbit words, to live by Ringo! }}}

{{ This is still one of the most remarkable and mesmerizing openings to a tv episode of anything I have ever seen I did have the advantage and pleasure seeing it first time effectively on the cinema screen (in VR) but even on a normal TV still something. }}

I don't get it. This may be related to space aliens or something, but I don't see the direct connection to Twin Peaks. Don't see why 4 minutes of screen time would be devoted to the details of a nuclear explosion, stunning as the effects may be.

I'm only two episodes from the end of the first two seasons, and so far I don't see the unity of story lines that has been touted. Not just loose ends, but whole narrative corridors heading off into nowhere. I'm not complaining because it's been fun to watch, but it seems overhyped as a narrative structure. Not much payoff for some of the odder things, such as the space aliens, temporary insanity, etc.

Whhhhaaaaat???? Something Lynch made is annoyingly vague and largely pointless??

QUELLE SURPRISE!!!!


okay I'll get out of here now...

I don't get it. This may be related to space aliens or something, but I don't see the direct connection to Twin Peaks. Don't see why 4 minutes of screen time would be devoted to the details of a nuclear explosion, stunning as the effects may be.- Halfy

{{well given to what you've watched and that its Lynch, its hard to say without knowing what might count as spoilery.
But the nuclear explosion is central to all events, and is the actual event recounted more mystically by Mike the One Armed Man in original Peaks.

That scene doesn't actually end there, just the youtube video does, so its without its finale as it were, but that I would deem more spoilery so unless you ask and want to know I'm not saying how that nuclear explosion scene ends!


Forest- you forget Peaks is a collaboration between Lynch and Frost, it has more obvious narrative structure than something like say Mullholand Drive or Lost Highway -and both those do have a narrative tale, just abstractly presented.

Art films are a very individual taste thing as all art is, directors like Lynch use film as the primary means of storytelling and invoking emotional response- the feeling is more important than the narrative structure underpinning it, in that Lynch will attempt to convey the meaning of the story through those invoked feelings in the viewer, not through expressed dialogue or normal story telling cinema conventions. Its a different use of film, more pure in being a visual medium in that it attempts to use just the visua and the sound scape as the primary means of conveying narrative.

But as I say taste vary- I adore Peter Greenaways very arty but in my view horrifically magnificent, The Cook, the Thief his Wife and Her lover, but I loathed his Prospero's Books as being arty and self indulgent for the sake of it and at the expense of best use of the film medium.

Its not necessary to like everything an artist does to appreciate their work, I am not an Eraserhead fan, nor a Lost Highway fan for example when it comes to Lynch, but I am a Peaks and its cousin Mulholland Drive fan, and an Elephant Man fan, and admirer rather than a fan of his take on Dune. But Peaks is different for me partly because its Lynch's manner of story telling but underpinned by Frosts more traditional narrative style. Lynch on his own is raw meat, pure and ready to give you a taste sensation, Lynch and Frost is meat on the bone, and for me that makes it more fun to get your teeth into.}}

to put things in thread context:

petty wrote: but otherwise made no sense and didn't even progress the plot.- Halfwise

{{ I'd disagree on both points for reasons I cant go into, but I'd say in the first series of Peaks at least nothing is pointless and nothing is wasted }}

I think I'll bugger off too before Petty wakes up...

{{I never sleep - how do you think I end up chalking up this many posts! I do occasionally pass out unconscious though   }}

I'm only two episodes from the end of the first two seasons..... whole narrative corridors heading off into nowhere. I'm not complaining because it's been fun to watch, but it seems overhyped as a narrative structure. Not much payoff for some of the odder things, such as the space aliens, temporary insanity, etc.'- Halfwise


{{To this I would say as far as the overall narrative of Peaks is concerned you can largely forget about a lot of what happens in series two with the exclusion of anything to with lodges and aliens and Major Briggs.
Pretty much as far as the overall story narrative is concerned its series 1- the finale of 2 plus those lodge/alien threads/fire walk with me/the return. All those things make one big story, the soap opera and more ridiculous antics of series 2, whilst often fun have little bearing on anything overall. Perhaps not surprising as this was when Lynch and Frost had the least to do with the show and were still angry at the tv execs forcing them to conclude who had killed Laura by revealing her killer- which Lynch considered like killing the golden goose as that central mystery was the one all the other ones spun off of.}}

Oh, I thought by "series 1" you meant the whole of the original series. I still wouldn't agree that "nothing is pointless and nothing is wasted" for the first year as it doesn't all tie up: more like "all is atmospheriically consistent".

A lot of the best scenes in Twin Peaks go nowhere. There's nothing wrong with that: one of the most critically acclaimed scenes in Fargo is the meeting of the old high school classmates; a study in personal space and propriety that has no reason to exist except as a celebration of subtlety in acting.

still wouldn't agree that "nothing is pointless and nothing is wasted" for the first year as it doesn't all tie up: more like "all is atmospheriically consistent".- Halfy

{{Well to take the scene you used as an example- the rock throwing at bottle  scene- you say its pointless if atmospherically consistent- but I say its Cooper learning how to recognise the shapes and structure under in the pattern of our reality and to intuit the underlying narrative of the dreamer whose dream it is, and he does this, in episode, because he was inspired by a dream, and his inspirational dreams leading him to act this way are sourced in the Fireman (Giant), and the Fireman is doing this in order to prepare Cooper to be able to accept and operate within a different comprehension of reality, and that is necessary in order for the plan that has been devised to confront Judy and Bob to be enacted, the enacting of which is the plot of the Return.
So for me that scene is neither pointless nor wasted, though it is also atmospherically consistent! }}}

Watched the last episode of the original series. What a waste. A couple minutes of interest when someone chained herself to the bank vault, but then it plunged irredeemably into Eraserhead land. 45 minutes of my life gone.

{{ Not sure what you mean by 'plunged irredeemably into Eraserhead land' I don't recall anything very Eraserhead like about the finale.
The finale was where Frost and Lynch came back and (in my view) finally put series 2 back on track after the often fun, but frivolous and often pointless frolics of that series. Putting the focus for the finale firmly back on the White and Black Lodges and on Bob. }}

It was a long stretch of Lynch style surrealism that I simply found annoying. They could have done the same in 5 minutes and actually closed the season with some character stories instead. That was the problem with Eraserhead: too much weirdness, very little story telling. It killed off any interest I may have to see anything more to do with Twin Peaks.

{{ Thats a shame in terms of the film, which would be next to watch, Fire Walk With Me, covering the last seven days of Lauua's life- I personally think its an excellent film even if you'd never seen Peaks. But its maybe for the best when it comes to series 2 if you thought the finale of series 2 was too indulgent, as Lynch often uses abstract ideas, sound and imagery to represent Lodge activity and the movement between worlds, and series 3 is all about the Lodges. }}}

Yeah, if it's more of that stuff I want nothing to do with it. Lynch is at his best with quirky characters, at his worst when he dips into surrealism.

{{ I like when he does both at once! But in Peaks all the weird stuff- the waiting room, dwarves talking backwards, giants in dreams, man-sized owls and aliens, the portals between worlds is all Lodge Bob/Judy related, and its represented through surreal and abstract visuals because its trying to convey experiences outside the human norm- and Return is all about the Lodges and therefore has a lot of that sort of film-making style in it.

The film much less so and it has a solid narrative underpinning what's going on: the final fall of Laura and what led her to it.

Narrative is the key for me, its why I am not a fan of Eraserhead or Lost Highway, as they are almost entirely meant as experiences, as how the viewer chooses to react to the imagery with a narrative arising out of that. I like a bit of structure at least and narrative underpinning the abstract to give it purpose and an aim- I feel with Peaks Lynchs abstract surrealism is being used to a purpose, pinned as it is to the structure of Frosts narrative. }}

Up to the point of the last segment I thought the surrealism was balanced perfectly with the quirky characters and storylines, but they hacked me off with the last bit.

{{ Turns out this isn't short so pull yourself a pint , lynch so much to talk about with that man!  Anyhow, point I would like to make here Halfy in response is that the thing with the Return, and this is will be very spoilery for episode 8 of that series, but I dont think you'll be watching series 3 so shouldn't matter for you, is that the actual sci-fi story that it tells is not, and dont tell anyone, very complicated or really that out there as sci-fi concepts go.

Now episode 8- the one that opens with the nuke going off, is considered, certainly on a first viewing to be one of the more surreal and inexplicable episodes when in  fact its really fairy simple.


Here it is broken down into its basic narrative concepts (there is a point to all this I promise), what I tend to think of as the Frost narrative.

During the first nuclear test, in the heart of the explosion at a subatomic and quantum level a tear is ripped in the fabric of time and space allowing an accidental and momentary link between our level of existence and another.
In this other dimension outside our own are beings totally unlike us who exist in a universe with completely different laws, different flows of time, gravity ect they also have technology that is so advanced it looks like magic to us.
These beings are also utterly evil and corrupting, feeding as they do off the energy generated by misery, pain and suffering. This energy can be converted into either a food source for the beings, or as a hugely potent fuel with the power to to create and sustain portals between the dimensions, and is therefore in this form highly valued.They call it garmonbozia.

Taking advantage of the rift they send their engineers through it to establish a permanent bridge, by manifesting a vessel in this dimension. It conforms and has the appearance of an everyday thing, and looks like a convenience store.
The engineers make use of the properties of an energy which has different facets in different dimensions but is really just one thing running through all realities, in our dimension it is electricity. Because it goes through everything that is it can be used to move between dimensions, or within one.
The engineers use this energy in their technology to tune into our dimension, and create their away outpost here in the form of the convenience store.

But there are worse things in the multi-verse than them. There is the predator creature Joudray, or Judy, who is capable of consuming entire realities by causing mass suffering and pain and consuming everything, including the electricity which underpins that reality. She is symbolised as a black all consuming fire, She is unable to enter through the rift but can send herself into our reality in the form of offspring, eggs which she lays through the rift.

She also sends her less powerful but still very nasty consort Baal, or Bob, into our reality encased in an orb. He will need to find a host in our reality to have substance however.
Bob is tasked with causing as much suffering as he can and creating and producing enough garmonbozia to eventually open a portal that will let Judy fully enter this reality in a form she can consume it.

Meanwhile elsewhere outside our realm of existence a red alert goes off in a fortress. Its occupant is known as the Fireman, he is tasked with ensuring the electricity flow which is everything is not damaged, he puts out the consuming fires such as the sort started by Judy when she consumes a reality, hence his name.
He responds to the alarm and checks his scanner to see what has happened, and is shown the nuclear explosion, arrival of the engineers and setting up of their outpost in our reality, and Judy sending Bob and her eggs into our reality.
In response he sends a similar orb as that of Bob only this one is golden, it contains the essence of Laura Palmer, a created being who is sacrificial bait and will be a counter to Bob in this reality and a trap for Judy.
Using his advanced technology he sends the orb across reality into ours to be implanted into an embryo being carried by the adult Laura Palmer, whose husband Leyland is possessed by the entity Bob.

Several years after the nuclear event Judy's eggs hatch and produce small creatures with wings , but they require a host to be useful.
Judy sends in some engineers who have been corrupted by her, shown by their appearance as if blackened by fire. As is the rule when entering another dimension the entity has to conform to the local physical laws, so has the appearance of a human woodsmen blackened in soot, but has almost no understanding of how things operate on this level of reality- however they can assimilate this knowledge by inserting their fingers through a persons skull and directly into their brain. Stopping a passing car they do just that.

The engineer having learned what he needs to know about how things work then locates a local radio station, kills the secretary and assimilates the DJ, keeping him alive only as long as the engineer needs to operate the equipment, use the local language and put out his message- which is a repeated phrase at a modulated frequency which has a hypnotic effect on anyone listening, putting them to sleep.
Whilst asleep we see the young Laura Palmer, who has been listening to the broadcast fall asleep and one of the creatures enters her mouth and to be swallowed, so finding its host.


Now I grant you is quite out there, but if you've read a lot of scifi, its not that out there- it basically boils down to evil aliens from another dimension get here through a rift in reality and need hosts to survive and act in this world,they want to cause suffering and feed off it. A big bad couple of them, Judy and Bob want to consume the entire reality, and another entity called the Fireman is tasked with stopping them by manipulating people across space and time to thwart Judy. His chief tool in this task will be a young FBI agent called Dale Cooper.

But what happens to this fairly simple narrative in Lynchs hands is that he turns it into something else,something genuinely alien.
The Lodge entities, how they act, the seemingly inexplicable and surreal ways they act and things they do, the sense of uncertainty, mystery, confusion and tension it creates around them, that I think is more likely how it would go if we ever do meet aliens- that their existence, their perception and understanding of existence, will be so vastly different from us that their actions would simply seem baffling, or unknowable.
Lynch creates that feeling, these things truly are alien to us and the interaction between our grasp of reality and their obviously much, much, wider one creates this friction between worlds. It creates the surreal.

But because its Lynch demonstrating this difference between worlds but underpinned by the Frost narrative, which is actually fairly simple, the actions of the entities only have the appearance of being baffling and surreal, each one is actually representative of something which makes sense, from the aliens point of view.

Take for example the appearance of the woodsmen and their convenience store in our reality- in a standard scifi you could just have a bunch of people dressed as aliens on a weird looking ship, talking about how they are phasing through the rift and assimilating the local physical laws and languages now, and materialising in this dimension, running checks on the local physics and trying to work out what direction and rate time flows in this dimension. Whilst in their engineering section huge advanced engines sparking with electricity are trying to tune the ship in to our realities flow. Before they finally materialise after a bumpy start with lots of dramatic electric discharges in the engines in engineering section, whilst the bridge crew explain how the exterior shell of the ship will conform to the physical norms and laws of the reality and take on the appearance of something suitable to the environment, before revealing it as the convenience store.

Or you can Lynch it and present it without dialogue or any form of explanation using spliced together shots of the convenience store, flashes of electricity and light, static, lots of disturbing sound and music, and the woodsmen appearing disappearing and moving about outside at different rates and speeds and times, then they all appear inside the store silhouetted in white electrical light as the store finally arrives permanently in this reality.



For me Lynchs way is better because it keeps the mystery of the alien.
Lynch doesn't want to technobabble his scifi aliens plot and means at us, he wants us to be faced with it with our actual level of comprehension as humans living now in this time- which is not a lot! So we see the convenience store we see the woodsmen, wee see the jumps in time, the electricity being used- all the  bits within or grasp, but the how, the why the means, who and what they are all unknown to us because it would be. It seems baffling. And more Lynch's way of doing it also conveys and invokes a response in the viewer, it gives the sense of our reality being under attack, that this is an unnatural event tearing at how things are supposed to be, not by telling us it is in dialogue but by making us feel like it is.

And so the actions of the woodmen and the appearance of the convenience store makes sense from the aliens perspective- to us seeing it first-hand for the first time it just seems like a surreal impossible event that lacks explanation. But becuse its actually just a means to covey a simple scifi idea; crossing dimensions, its actually not baffling, its just really different from the human norm of operating. Truly alien.

Lynch presents his 'aliens' the Lodges and its denizens in this way as its how he is representing communication, not just between different species, but across the gulf of different notions of reality. As these aliens arent from another planet, they are from another reality and dimension/plane of existence entirely so at first glance their actions appear incomprehensible as do their means.

There have been more surreal sci-fi plots and concepts in Doctor Who in the past than in Peaks. What marks Peaks out is how Lynch presents those concepts in a way which is really alien to us. }}}

but given that aliens really are alien, they should look alien and not human. This is where the attempt for realistic alien strangeness veers into surrealism. So the effort is wasted.

{{I dont think so because it works within the context of the given narrative- when beings shift realities, or densities, they have to conform to the rules of that reality. The forms they take on are all reflective of the type of universe they find themselves in. In the scene above the convenience store when they first arrive we see the Woodman realising our realm has 'animal life', thus they are animal life when here. There are also other aspects- the woodsmen appear so because of two fires which happened in Peaks, the last claiming the life of the log Ladies husband, who had discovered some of the precious fuel variant of the garbonzia and opened the portal at the sycamore trees. The woodsmen take on this soot covered appearance because of his interaction with their realm and because it also represents there corruption by the black flames of Judy's corruption for whom they are serving and because they serve as workman to the more powerful beings, so workman clothes reflect their stature and place in the alien society. I also find them very disturbing!





There is also the strong hint that in some cases, and especially true of beings we only ever see in the lodges, that they are not as they appear but representations of them made by the limited human perception of the viewer through whoever perception of events we see things, the human mind making  an attempt to interpret beings and events and understand what they are seeing but that are beyond our perceptional or intellectual grasp. }}

{{ Peaks the Return and technology.

Whilst rewatching the Return it occurred to me that there was more to the use of technology going on than meets the eye.

So I wanted to break this down into the different ways I see technology being used.

There is first the question of if the Lodge entities, the Woodsman, Judy and Bob have technology of their own.
At first glance most of what these beings do, say and even where they exist seems more akin to magic than to technology. But as Clarke said any suitably advanced technology looks like magic.
And we do get indications that the Lodge entities do indeed have technology. Its presented to us looking industrial; large iron devices such as the alarm bell in the Fireman's house. Or the 'tank' like object that Cooper find himself inside after being cast out the lodge by the Arm's doppleganger.
And the Woodsmen in particular seem to operate various types of industrial looking machinery as well as in in some fashion 'operating; the convenience store, which appears able to move around our realm of reality and to connect to others in space and time.
We also learn the the creation of the dopplegangers, the tulpa, which require among their ingredients to produce DNA from the person being copied implying some sort of medical technology is involved. And we are explicitly told that Dougie Jones tulpa was 'manufactured for a purpose'.
Then there is the owl ring itself which appears to have several potential properties but one definite one is that ability to transport someone upon death directly to the Waiting Room where their pain and suffering can be harvested as food in the form of garmonbozia.

Part of the key to understanding Lodge technology is to consider electricity. In Peaks electricity is a multi-dimensional force, in our universe it's just electricity, with all the properties we know of it, but it exists across universes and when seen from other perspectives, other realms of existence, other aspects of it are apparent in those dimensions we can't normally see. And the Lodger entities among other things can use electricity in our universe to travel through and manifest themselves or even just their intent.
So what appears magic to us is more likely a lack of having the fuller picture they possess of the different aspects of things which only appear in singular fashion within a given reality.
Another aspect to consider is we always see lodge technology through human interpretation of it, which does not seem accurate so much as representative within our limited perception.

To give an example Mike's problem with Bob is that if he possess Laura as planned then the lodge entities, Mike included dont get their half of the deal they struck with Bob, that once her misery and suffering had reached its peak Bob would murder her and send her to the Lodge where they would all share up her sorrow as suffering.
The food, the pain and suffering is referred to and seen visually as creamed corn, because this was Laura's favourite food and therefore comes to represent food, specifically Laura's suffering as food, visually throughout.
Mike also refers to the fact that he has ben storing up previous gained pain food, and he refers to this as him having 'canned corn'.
And indeed when we see the Convenience store you can see it contains rows of unmarked canned goods.
Like the garmonbozia being represented visually as creamed corn, and Mikes storage of the pain food being shown as actual cans of food, we get an idea of how the lodge technology is being perceived through a human understanding.


Taken all in its seems safe to say that the Lodge entities do in deed possess technology, unfathomable to us, but nevertheless they manufacture things, and they manipulate machinery to cause effects and they utilise existing technology they find.

Which brings me onto point two. The Lodge entities have been about as long as there have been humans to perceive them. But where they entered our realm was limited it seems by being to places which were natural weak between worlds. Places humans would go on to consider sacred or cursed. Magical groves, enchanted trees, sacred pools and the like. Such as the Sycamore Grove in Peaks.
These places again hint at having been added to or used by Lodge technology. The Sycamore portal can be opened with the highest form of garmonbozia which seems to be used like a power source.
But natural or not in the Peaks region the first stories of Lodge entities can be traced back to local Indian legends.
But there was nothing like the break through of the lodge world that occurred during Peaks. So what changed?

The answer is human technology.
It is human technology which either causes the rupture between worlds, or attracts like a moth to a flame, the evil reality consuming entity Judy  as a direct result of the White Sands nuclear test. With Judy finding a way to spew her offspring and servants into our reality through the heart of the explosion.
Upon arrival it is the technology of radio which allow a single woodsman to hypnotise and entire town in one go to find hosts for Judy's offspring.
But probably the biggest use of technology in the Return is the cell phone. Mr C uses one constantly to run his crime empire, plot with Diane and others and to lay his traps. It is technology which lets him uncover that his 'friends' have been hired to assassinate him by secretly recording their phone conversation, allowing him to kill them first.
Even as Dougie Jones it is fruit machines which initially save the day for him.
The glass box Mr C sets up to try to capture Cooper on his return is a mass of technology and electrical cable and computers monitoring it and recording it.
And of course electricity is everywhere in our world now, allowing the lodge entities the freedom to move as they wish pretty much anywhere they wish.

It would seem that Lynch is saying the advancements made in human technology are more for the worse than the better.

But that can't be said to be entirely true, as what else is the Fireman's cinema screen but technology of some sort? It is used to send the Laura orb to our reality and it was used to move Bob's exit from the portal to the Palmer house where he could have united with Judy, to the police station where all the people necessary to defeat Bob were gathered.

But perhaps the best example of technology, or at leat understanding a technology to be good is in how Mr C is finally shot by Lucy. She realised it was him because she suddenly understood how cell phones worked. Her lightbulb moment about cell phones led her to realizing Mr C was a phony.




For me what it says is that with the growth of technology so too the growth of what is dark in humans has room to spread as well, and infect people and places it would not have reached before bringing pain and sorrow and suffering with it.
But so too does what is good in people.
The fight of course, as in Peaks is between which sides of our nature is winning. }}}

{{ I wanted to share this, I realise at 4 and a half hours long its a bit of a watch- but like a really good lecture it sucks you in. I watched it in two lengthy bursts but I'm a Peaks enthusast.
In my own ramblings on Peaks I have mainly focused on Frosts narrative on top of Lynch's, well Lynchiness. I have touched here and there on how Peaks is itself interpreting the Tv landscape in which it appears and also on how Lynch views tv and society as increasingly negative. But I hadnt goen into it in any real depth, and never took my conclusions to the logical extent this does with such power.
This is a full discourse on the Lynch side of things, what Peaks means and represents to Lynch- and I find I cannot diasgree with any of it as well as it fitting so many mysterious and seemingly at first glance random scenes or sights.
But like the show, its about mystery, and watching this will as he warns near the start remove all the mystery, and for Lynch thats a very bad thing, so tread carefully and be sure before you watch that you want all your Peaks mysteries solved. You may not like the answers.

I may attempt to sumarise his argument at some point for those who can't find the time for such a lengthy discourse, but it would not be able to do his work justice. }}

{{  Ok here goes- my attempt to distil the main points from the above video. Its in 2 parts or it would still be too long. Ive included a couple scenes as illustration but they are not necesary to watch. Not as long as the vid I hope, but long enough, so if you can watch the vid I heartily recommend doing so instead. If not but your curious what its about, read on.

The point here is to try to cover the main points but in some brevity in comparison to the video or you'd be as well watching it, and if your reading this then I assume you don't have 4 and ½ hours to spare! For that reason I will outline the underpinning theories but I will not be citing the evidence, references, interviews, books etc except where absolutely necessary- all that is in the video, this is just trying to lay out his theory.

Part 1

Context

This is basically in two areas. 1st how Lynch views life at a spiritual and physical level.
And 2nd how Lynch thinks of Film and Tv as  mediums.
These two areas underpin everything that follows and are directly connected to each other.

First, life.
Lynch is a proponent and practitioner of transcendental meditation, in brief it posits that as you meditate and progress 'down' in the layers of material and spiritual existence everything breaks down into smaller and smaller bits, and eventually, so the theory goes, everything in the universe becomes one thing that's also therefore everything- called the Unified Field. The meditation lets you go down through these levels until your own essence joins back up with that of the Unified Field that underpins the entire universe and you too become one with it.
Lynch compares this place to a great ocean of consciousness and it is perfectly balanced. Balance is hugely important to Lynch.
In this meditation the process is likened to dipping a piece of cloth in gold then hanging it in the breeze to dry, the dipping is entering the Unified Field and the gold its effect, drying in the sun represents 'activity' but the effect of activity is to fade away almost all the gold bar a few specks left, so you have to keep 'dipping' yourself in gold, meditating often to get to the Unified Field, until you are pure gold- or a state of oneness with the universal consciousness contained in the Unified Field.
This is where Lynch's ideas come from, he comes out of his mediation, leaving the Unified Field, the Ocean of Consciousness and then 'catches the fish of ideas' from it. Everything that then happens in whatever film etc. he does based on that, in some way comes back always, no matter how random it seems, to that idea he caught.
And the fish he caught that was Twin Peaks, it was called Laura Palmer, and it was all about restoring balance.


2nd we need to talk about the fact Lynch is a film maker not a tv director. Lynch makes cinema almost in its purest form of a visual medium. And he firmly believes film is better than TV- and probably more so when he began Twin Peaks.
At that time tv was largely consequence free, people died but it was ok it was just a plot device and we didn't dwell on pain, suffering, the misery and distress such a death might cause, just on the puzzle of how our heroes would solve the case, get out that weeks scrape, nail the bad guy. Violence, pain, suffering had been made consumable by tv, just another product it was selling. Consumable violence to go with your consumable tv dinner. And by the end of the episode, maybe a two parter if you were lucky, it would all be wrapped up. We'd have closure.

Remember that word, closure, its very, very important.

Film on the other-hand is for Lynch a language in sound and visuals, he considers himself not good with words, believing others can make words soar, where he uses pure cinema as his language.
But for Lynch the difference between the two mediums is so much greater and more spiritual than just preference or style or even snobbery.
Cinema you see is produced by shining a white light through film to project the image. For Lynch that act- the interacting between white light and just the image produces magic and is spiritual because it is balanced- the white of the light, the purity of the image being projected by it.
TV on the other-hand works quite differently, especially back in cathode ray tube days- left to its own devices the mechanism that produces a picture on a tv screen would produce an image that was all white and only pure white. But it doesn't because part of the light is blocked producing areas of darkness which make up the image. In other words TV is not balanced spiritually for Lynch because its image is not the product of the white light plus image but the white light being impinged on by darkness to create the image. When we watch TV, we are looking right into the darkness. TV is controlled by luminosity, by how much light the darkness lets you see.

And this goes further for Lynch. With each successive generation of tv watcher starting in the 50's tv has got crueller, harsher, meaner and more importantly its got better and better at producing and spreading fear- in the news, in its showcasing of graphic violence and sex, in advertising, in politics. Fear sells TV. And TV sells Fear. And every generation it's darker and more fearful than the last.
For Lynch the tv has broken the balance represented by the pure language of cinema projected through white light, TV is being consumed by its own darkness. And the darker it becomes the more fear it spreads back out into the world, so the world darkens more and as a result tv becomes darker and so on.

Some have thought of Lynch's work, particularly Peaks and Blue Velvet as exposing the dark underbelly hidden behind the surface of 'good' America- but its the wrong way to think about it, for Lynch he has to show us the darkness in order that we can appreciate and see the light. So we can have balance between the two.

To quote the Doctor, “The beautiful dark, without it we wouldn't be able to see the stars.”
For Lynch he has to show the horror and the darkness so you will see and appreciate the light. Lynch's favourite film is Wizard of Oz, a story about a girl who has an idyllic farm life surrounded by people who care and love her, and is whisked off by a disaster on a dreamlike, often nightmarish adventure, before she can appreciate the life she always had and the good all around her.
She needs to experience the darkness in order to appreciate the light that was always there. At the end Dorothy achieves balance in a dream shared by the audience joined together in the white light of cinema.

For Lynch the difference between television and film is not just stylistic its spiritual, a contest for that balance between light and darkness.

One other thing, the dream of film and television. For Lynch there is a magic when the red velvet curtains go back in the cinema and the square of light comes on to fill the darkness- you are transported into that place to join it. For Lynch this process has 3 parts- there is the audience, or reality, there are the actors on the screen doing their day jobs and everyone making the production and filming it, that's another reality (don't pay any attention to the man behind the curtain!), and then at the point they meet there is the dream which they jointly share for as long as the film lasts. Film or tv are not passive for Lynch, they are a place where those two worlds of different realities collide, meet and become the dream together. 'Intercourse between two worlds'
And this meeting of reality and dream is taking to an extreme through the Return.

And that all brings us to Twin Peaks itself finally.
For Lynch the purpose, the aim of Twin Peaks was to bring balance back to television.
He was not going to give the audience what they wanted and got everywhere else- a painless murder, a consequence free death, a mystery to solve and all the answers and closure by episodes end.
He would deny the audience all three- :Laura would die horribly and cruelly at the hands of a monster, her death would send shock-waves of grief, pain and horror throughout an entire community, and the mystery of her death? We would never, ever find out who killed her or why.

That was the golden idea fish Lynch came up with to restore balance to TV as he saw it. The character of Laura Palmer would be the vehicle by which Lynch would show us the dark and by which make us appreciate the light. Laura would restore balance to tv. She was the One.

But onto the darkness of her suffering you need to shed a light, to balance the dark you need the light, we can only see the darkness in the light, and that light comes in the form of the FBI- shining the light of investigation onto the mystery of her death. And everywhere it is shone new mysteries and new stories would be uncovered in the shadows, all with the central premise at its heart of the murder and mystery of Laura Palmer.
She was the central idea, the golden idea, the fish Lynch caught from the Sea of Consciousness that is the heart of Peaks.

In this view of Peaks the show is utterly meta in way that only Lynch could conceive of.

Characters serve as both characters existing in a tv show who know they are characters in a tv show, some whose intuition tells them they are, and others who have no idea, and some are surrogates for real life individuals and the audience itself. All weaved together in a two way street that represents the fight between light and dark on television, feeding back into each other.
The fasted way to give an idea of how this works is to give an example or two, and who better to start with than everyone's favourite FBI agent Dale Cooper.

Cooper is the audience. And I don't just mean he is our surrogate in the story, he is that too. But Cooper operates on two levels. He acts as a character in the show, investigating a murder but he also acts off intuition, makes leaps of logic that progress the story but which in reality he should not be able to make or which even in-show take place in another reality.

I will use an example that is given in the video above from Fire Walk With Me, whilst at the Trailer Park investigation the disappearance of Agent Desmond, Cooper is informed by the trailer park owner of exactly where Agent Desmond was going, which trailer and even points it out for Cooper. Only for Cooper to walk off in the opposite direction, when asked where he is going he simply responds, “I'm going, over here.' And walks straight to the now empty lot where the trailer stood where Agent Desmond found the Owl Ring beneath and promptly vanished.

The question arises how on earth did Cooper know where to go? The answer for Cooper the tv character is he got the answer through intuition. What was he intuiting?
Us. The watching audience. Because we are there too, sharing the dream by watching and engaging with the show.
We  know where Agent Desmond went missing because we saw it, and Cooper is picking up on that and acts accordingly.
This also answers another mystery of that film, in Laura's dream when she is offered the owl ring Cooper warns her not to take it. This has long been a puzzler to fans, as its only by wearing the ring she is saved from possession by Bob and upon her death goes to the red room. If she had not taken the ring her fate would have been worse than death, and Bob would have used her as a vehicle for even more unspeakable evil.
So why would Cooper whose intuition is so great warn her not to take it when she is offered it?
Simple, he has never seen the ring before, but we the viewer have twice by that point, first on the finger of a woman who ended up murdered and on a slab, and then again when found by Agent Desmond, who vanished never to be seen again upon coming into contact with it. At this point in the film we the viewer think its bad, so Coopers intuition, which is just him the tv character inside the show picking up as intuition  what we the viewer watching on the screen know, tells him its bad and so he warns Laura not to take it.

Another example is Director Gordon Cole, played by creator and director of Peaks Lynch himself. The director playing a director in which his character directs the other characters in the mystery.
There is a scene in the Return in which Cole is recounting a dream he had to the other members  of the Blue Rose team.
In it he was siting at a cafe in Paris with Monica Belucci, not her playing a part, but the real her talking with the fictional Gordon Cole. Cole says that Cooper was there too in the dream, but he could not see his face. And then Monica tells him that they are living inside a dream, but then asks him who is the dreamer whilst looking passed him over his shoulder and directly into camera. Cole turns to look at what she is looking at and instead sees himself from original Peaks much younger.



To dissect this crucial dream. Cole is also Lynch the actor and director, Lynch dreamt up Twin Peaks as its creator, then assumed a role, Gordon Cole, he created the dream we are all sharing and lived inside the dream as Gordon Cole. But the dream that is the Return is not the original dream Lynch had. We will come to why it's not shortly. Suffice to say the audience are also here in this dream.
The dream is further bending realities as the scene not only has the real Monica Belucci playing herself but the street it is filmed on is having a real world art exhibit of the work of David Lynch.
Cooper is in this dream because we the audience have to be there too, it's our dream too and Cooper is our representative so he has to be present, which is why it is a dream set in the 'real world' and why we nor Cole can see Cooper's face, as tv characters cannot see out of the screen into the real world and in the real world Cooper has no face, he's a character his 'face' belongs to someone else, the actor who plays him.
So we can see this as a shared dream set in the real world, where tv character Gordon Cole dreams it and the audience is there in the dream through Cooper and by watching the show, and reality is present in the dream in its location and the presence of Belucci
And naturally when tv characters dream their dreams take place in the real world and ours take place in the same world tv and film ideas originate from- the Sea of Consciousness, the Unified Field.

For the last example I will take a group of characters largely as a whole for now- the lodge entities. Primarily Bob, the Arm, Mike, the Giant and the Woodsmen. They are characters who know exactly what they are. They are people from the world of tv.  It's one of the firs things they tell us when they first arrive on our screens, in our Twin Peaks dream.



'From pure air we descend'- transmitted through the airwaves.
'electricity' the means by which they travel from the airwaves into your tv.
'the chrome reflects our image' (said to extreme close ups of eyes and mouths peering down the camera) chromium is a main component in producing a tv image.
This scene they describe what they are, creatures of the TV.

The Arm controls the flow of mystery, represented in the Peaks world by coffee, which fuels the investigators. Cooper needs coffee to investigate, has a passion for it above all else (always paired with donuts or cherry pie or some other sweet thing, sweet and bitter, coffeee and cherry pie, balance). In the red room the Arm demonstrates his control over the flow of mystery fuel when he makes Cooper's cup of coffee flow normal, fast and stop altogether. He is the God of TV, the man behind the curtain. And how much light gets thrown on the darkness is up to him, but he is not to be trusted because as the God of Tv his personality and motives are dictated by the audience, he's reflective of the zeigiest of the times the show is made. And we know what Lynch thinks of TV.
And like all the Lodge inhabitants save the Giant who does not reside in the Lodge (I'll come back to him in part two, the fact he resides in a huge old fashioned cinema theatre located on a seemingly endless sea should be a clue by now though) they are dark beings who feed on fear and suffering and misery, the more dark stuff we the tv audience want and watch, the stronger we make the Black Lodge inhabitants. They feed of it, garmbozia represented as creamed corn, because corn is what we are eating as we join the tv/cinema dream, either popcorn at cinemas or creamed corn in our tv dinner as we watch.
Bob is the epitome of this, as he says he wants nothing, “I don't want anything. I need.' Bob is our unfettered appetite for horror, violence, suffering and fear, the guilty pleasure of it for the sake of it. Bob invaded the audiences mind, we wanted to see his terrible acts, we wanted to know who he was, we wanted to know how he was connected to Laura and her death, we wanted to watch him action, and we didn't just want to know, we too needed to know.
We made it happen. We, as participants in the dream of Twin Peaks, we changed the dream.
And when we did and Laura's murder was solved, Bob and the Black Lodge won.

Lynch came back to Peaks to write and direct its finale and he ended it -knowing it was not commissioned to ever come back- on a seemingly massive cliff hanger, with a new mystery for us to think about. But this one was different, Laura's mystery was designed to restore balance, this mystery was symbolic of it being destroyed, of the darkness of tv winning.
Cooper, the audience representative in the show is taken over an possessed by evil tv spirit Bob, we the audience had become enamoured more of Bob than Laura, we had failed to see the good light in our desire to see Bob at play and to demand our answers. The dark spirit of tv had won.

But what is the purpose to all this? And how does it fit with what we saw in the Return? Well for that we have to go back to the beginning.
The idea was to use the murder of Laura Palmer as a catalysts of mystery which would undercover darkness and expose it to the light of investigation and so provide balance in television. Light and dark in equal measure. Comedy and horror, joy and tragedy all in the same show, all potentially infinite and all springing from the well of Laura's' sacrificial death.
But that's not what happened. The mystery was solved, we did find out who killed Laura Palmer. After massive audience pressure and mounting tv executive pressure as a result Lynch and Frost were forced into giving the audience what they were demanding, answers and closure.
And they got it.

This was not just a blow to Lynch, in his own words 'they killed the goose that laid the golden eggs' it was a blow to his whole endeavour on a spiritual level. He had tried to use Laura as a means to restore balance to tv through the mystery of her death and the light of investigation, and it had been rejected, the audience who loved it most had killed it off with their demands for closure, for answers.

After teh reveal of her killer was forced on them Lynch left the show and it basically jumped the shark and meandered for a while trying to do the sort of stuff Lynch might do and largely failing. When he did come back to do that finale he restored its sense of purpoe but left it with the state of play as he saw it- he had failed, the audience had rejected Laura, rejected balance, and all they wanted was Bob and everything to be answered and tied up in a neat bow. The audience and the studio had demanded closure and it had not only killed the show, in Lynch's eyes it was another huge triumph for the spiritual darkness of television. Closure was the greatest enemy to mystery, and mystery was the means by which the darkness could be revealed in the light of investigation. Closure in Lynch's eyes had killed Laura Palmer and with her Twin Peaks.

So when Lynch brought Peaks back for Fire Walk With Me and for the Return the Closure that had killed the show, whose source was in the audiences own demands for it was their part in the shared dream, so it became a character in the show itself, and it would have a name. It's name would be Judy, and everyone, characters and audience alike would be trying to find Judy for one last showdown.

End of part one! }}